WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 61: Three in the Morning, Four at Night (4)
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I ignored Jihan's incomprehensible muttering and explained my traits to him instead.
I currently had two traits.
One was the Blessing of Soter.
[The stronger a god's power gets, the stronger the effect it brings gets too. It can stack up to ten times. Think of it as a kind of all-purpose buff skill.]
"If you had a skill that good, you should've told me sooner. I went through hell and back, needed and unneeded, all of it."
[How do you go your whole life without once trying to use it?]
"You called it a talent, so I figured it was some passive skill. That my fault? Fine, whatever. So what about this Exec... no, Executioner's Sword?"
[The more you kill of a specific group, the more your stats rise against that group.]
Executioner's Sword wasn't some skill that summoned a sword.
Using it didn't make a blade appear or anything.
It was more like a buff that specifically targeted certain factions.
"A skill that gets stronger the more you kill, and a skill that raises your stats when you kill a specific group... isn't that basically a serial killer's kit?"
He said it like that, but his face was saying something completely different.
Wasn't hard to guess which "specific group" Jihan had in mind the second he said it.
Pretty rich, coming from someone who had zero standing to call anyone else a serial killer.
I used up the rest of Jihan's merit points gifting him skills and items.
Got an earful demanding better healing potions.
What am I supposed to do, this is all I've got.
Honestly, the injustice of it all.
I came to in a luxurious hotel suite.
Clearing Floor 5 had left plenty of mental fatigue still sitting on me.
Still, my body felt refreshed, and that alone made me happy.
I ordered breakfast through room service.
The room Park Siyu had booked was seriously nice.
Looked like it was originally Park Siyu's own private room.
Keeping a suite reserved for a whole year, I had no idea what kind of money-flexing that even was.
Guess I'll try that myself someday.
Right around when I finished eating, the phone Park Siyu had given me started ringing.
"Does this guy ever sleep?"
Technically morning, sure, but it wasn't even six yet.
I assumed it was Park Siyu without even checking the number and picked up.
"Hangyeol-ah!! Are, are you okay? I heard you got hurt? What happened?"
"Huh? Noona?"
Eunyoung noona's voice threw me off for a second.
Is she with Park Siyu right now?
I checked the caller ID just in case. It was Eunyoung noona's number.
"How'd you get my number?"
"Does that matter right now?"
"No, but stalkers kind of freak me out, you know?"
"Who's a stalker! Choi Suhyun gave it to me!"
Hearing Choi Suhyun's name put my mind at ease.
That guy has a looser mouth than he lets on.
Not that it mattered if he told her.
"Your house was completely wrecked. You're really okay, right?"
Calming down my clearly worked-up noona seemed like the priority here.
I calmly explained everything that had happened to Eunyoung noona.
Except for the part about Jihan.
The story was long, and I didn't have time to walk through it in detail anyway.
Better she didn't know yet.
That guy's a Black Hunter, isn't he?
Compared to other countries, Korea managed its Hunters pretty well.
Made sense, since it had been a tech powerhouse even before gates started showing up.
When it came to computerized processing, no other country could keep pace with Korea.
Korean Hunters were all registered under the Hunter Network (HN), managed by the Hunter Association.
Most other countries didn't have anything like Korea's HN system, and even among those that did, not everyone followed it.
The definition of a Black Hunter was fuzzy, but broadly speaking, it meant a Hunter who wasn't registered under HN and therefore wasn't tracked by management.
Since that category included foreign Hunters too, being a Black Hunter wasn't automatically a crime.
There'd be some inconveniences or unfair treatment, sure.
But the HN system had only been built for convenience in the first place.
If it wasn't convenient, there was no obligation to use it.
The fact that Yu Jihan was a Black Hunter had just caught me off guard, that was all.
"Good, thank god. So are you staying at that hotel for a while?"
"Probably until the dungeon expedition wraps up."
"I was gonna ask you to come with me on a dungeon run... guess that can't be helped with everything going on."
Word about Raon Guild and the dungeon expedition had already spread through the whole guild.
Seemed like she also knew I'd gotten added to the ticket member list through Park Siyu.
"Let's go into a dungeon together again once this is over."
"Sure."
I kept things short and ended the call with Eunyoung noona.
I drank my morning coffee along with the dessert that came out afterward.
This time it was actually Park Siyu calling.
Since we'd already covered everything important, this call was basically just checking in.
Park Siyu got straight to the point the second I picked up.
"What are your current stats?"
"Uh, hold on."
I pulled up my status window right away.
Rank: Proxy (8%)
Strength: B (21%)
Vitality: B- (11%)
Mana: B+ (30%)
Recovery: C+ (85%)
Merit points: 6,950
Skills <Line> <Wind Fang> <Moonlight Slash> <Mana Detection> <Meteor Strike>
Traits <Blessing of Soter> <Executioner's Sword> <Descent>
- One for you, one for me
I hadn't opened this status window in a good while.
Aside from Recovery, most of my stats had landed in B territory.
"That's fast."
"Well, I am a Guardian."
Aside from Choi Suhyun, nobody who knew about the god Soter also knew I was the god's proxy.
Choi Suhyun himself had been the one to suggest keeping that part quiet.
Gods were given the authority to select executives.
My level was still too low right now, but apparently once it rose, there'd be all kinds of benefits I could give executives.
The "starter pack" Choi Suhyun had mentioned before was a good example.
"Your growth rate alone tells me this god Soter has real potential."
"Thanks for the kind words."
"Wasn't talking to you."
Come on, seriously?
Would it kill you to just let it go instead of picking a fight over something like that?
The conversation strayed for a moment before circling back to business.
"With stats like that, you shouldn't have any trouble becoming a B-Rank Hunter."
The minimum entry requirement for A-Rank dungeons started at C-Rank Hunter.
Of course, dungeons didn't actually screen who could enter or not.
It was purely a safety measure.
Entering as I was now wouldn't cause any real problem, but if the Hunter Park Siyu had personally recruited turned out to still be C-Rank, the optics wouldn't look great.
What I lacked right now was raw dungeon-clearing experience.
"I'll give you whatever support you need. Become a B-Rank Hunter within a month, before the A-Rank expedition. If you need a team, I'll assign you capable Hunters."
"I don't need a team."
Appreciated the thought, but I figured moving solo would be way faster for now.
Hearing that I planned to solo it, Park Siyu didn't push back at all.
"Just give me one person instead. Doesn't need to be a Hunter, just someone sharp on dungeon information."
That person would end up handling everything related to my dungeons for the next month.
"I'll contact you again tonight."
Park Siyu clearly understood exactly what I meant by that request.
[Dungeon cleared (all participants) +400]
[All monsters eliminated (all participants) +800]
[Man Scorpion eliminated +1000]
[(Hidden) Oasis discovered +400]
[(Hidden) Sandworm eliminated +1200]
[Final +3,800]
"Ugh, what a mess."
I stepped out of the dungeon and shook the sand out of my shoes.
Mid-boss fight, an oasis had shown up out of nowhere.
The oasis brought a hidden monster along with it, and the whole battle went sideways.
Thanks to that I picked up extra merit points, sure.
I honestly couldn't tell whether I should be happy about that or not.
I caught a cab on the main road and headed back to the hotel room.
"You're back early."
A man sitting in the wide suite's living room, eating lunch, waved a hand at me.
Kim Gangwoo.
Twenty-seven years old, he was the secretary from the assistant division who'd come to find me back when I first cleared the Giant Ant Cavern and was writing up my report in the cafeteria.
The assistant division was split into a few branches. The First Auxiliary Secretariat handled internal guild administrative work, the Second Auxiliary Secretariat managed dungeon-related affairs, and the Protocol Secretariat handled the guild representative and master-tier Hunters.
Calling it "protocol" made it sound official, but it was basically just personal assistant work.
Unlike other secretaries, whose salary came straight from the guild, Protocol Secretariat staff got paid by the Hunter they served.
Though apparently the guild still chipped in a set amount on top of that.
Companies, man. What a system.
Anyway, because of that, the Protocol Secretariat pretty much handled everything for their assigned Hunter, work-related or personal, no distinction.
Kim Gangwoo was the youngest secretary assigned directly under Park Siyu's protocol team.
I sat down across from Kim Gangwoo, who was in the middle of a late lunch.
"Early, my ass. I was supposed to be back this morning."
"I told you morning was too soon."
"None of this would've happened if I hadn't run into that oasis. And also, ordering jjajangmyeon in a hotel suite is a little sad, don't you think?"
"I ordered it because I wanted it. Nobody bothers a man while he's eating, and yet here you are nagging."
Having finished off his jjajangmyeon, Kim Gangwoo cracked open a can of beer and drank.
That neat, put-together image from when we first met was nowhere to be found anymore.
Right now he just felt like some older guy from the neighborhood, in a different way.
Gangwoo had been ordered by Park Siyu to skip guild work for a month and support me full time.
Since he was in the kind of position where he had no choice but to do whatever Park Siyu told him, he couldn't really say much about it, but he was human, so of course he wasn't thrilled either.
Fortunately, whatever complaints he had aside, Kim Gangwoo was the type to get the job done.
Ever since I'd cleared my first dungeon way faster than Kim Gangwoo expected, we'd gotten close fast.
Roughly the same age, so we agreed to drop formalities, on the condition that he not mention it to Park Siyu.
Kim Gangwoo pushed his empty jjajangmyeon bowl aside.
"Wait, hold on. What'd you say you found?"
"An oasis."
Obviously I hadn't gone looking for it on purpose.
Hearing the word oasis, Kim Gangwoo's expression changed.
"And the sandworm?"
"Yeah, it was there. Killed it too, it was getting in the way."
Setting down his empty beer can, Kim Gangwoo looked genuinely startled.
"You said it's been less than a year since you became a Hunter, right? What the hell even are you?"
[1] Jjajangmyeon — Korean-Chinese noodles in black bean sauce, a staple cheap-and-cheerful delivery order, hence the "sad" contrast with the luxury hotel suite.
Footnotes:
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